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Amazon, Google slash cloud storage prices more than 25 percent

Google undercuts Amazon in cloud-y pricing war.

Rivals Amazon and Google both announced steep pricing cuts to their cloud storage services today. Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) prices are dropping 24 percent to 28 percent while the price of Google Cloud Storage has been cut more than 30 percent in the past week.

This seems to be a bit of a pricing war: Google already cut prices by 20 percent earlier this week and then followed up with an additional 10 percent cut today to stay under Amazon's new pricing. The lower prices for both services take effect December 1.

Amazon S3 and Google Cloud Storage can be used by developers in tandem with cloud infrastructure services like Google App Engine and the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. Both allow users to store data by the hundreds or even thousands of terabytes.

Amazon's new reduced pricing charges 9.5 cents per gigabyte per month for the first terabyte, compared to the previous price of 12.5 cents. After the first terabyte, users pay 8 cents per gigabyte per month, and it keeps going down:

Google Cloud Storage's latest price is 8.5 cents per gigabyte per month for the first terabyte. The new Durable Reduced Availability Storage (DRA) service for infrequently accessed data got a price drop from 7 cents to 6.3 cents per gigabyte per month:

With storage prices dropping and companies like Google and Amazon leveraging economies of massive scale, customer prices are likely to continue moving downward. According to Amazon, this is the 24th time S3 prices have been cut. In addition to the price cut already mentioned, Amazon is also lowering prices for its Reduced Redundancy Storage and Elastic Block Store services.

In related news, Google this week unveiled new high memory and high CPU instances for its Compute Engine service, which is still in a limited preview. Amazon revealed a new data warehouse service called Redshift; a "Data Pipeline" for moving and processing large amounts of data; and a new auto-discovery feature for Amazon ElastiCache, which helps developers build caching layers between applications and databases.

Promoted Comments

Interesting to note that, for Google Drive (/docs, /gmail, /picassa) Google storage for 'the average user' used to be so much cheaper (expand the pricing structures, old vs new... and of course, divide the old by 12 as it's annual).

Pricing changed when Google Drive came out. 1TB/mo used to be ~$21/mo. Now it's ~$50/mo. I grabbed 200GB prior to the jump; glad I'm able to stick to paying the legacy price as long as I don't change my account...

Doesn't all this have to do with the price of hard drives finally coming down and not so much economies of scale? Economies of scale are vital but I think that concept applies directly to the number of users which AWS already has enough to make it a fairly efficient operation already.

Doesn't all this have to do with the price of hard drives finally coming down and not so much economies of scale? Economies of scale are vital but I think that concept applies directly to the number of users which AWS already has enough to make it a fairly efficient operation already.

Are they any consumer backup services to take advantage of this cheap space? I know there used to be Jungle Disk but it sucks now and I haven't heard of any others.

Depending on what you need it for, there are MUCH cheaper storage solutions from file-sharing or backup vendors. You could even get the 2TB mentioned above for free by hacking together a couple hundred DropBox accounts and having some refer the others.

Interesting to note that, for Google Drive (/docs, /gmail, /picassa) Google storage for 'the average user' used to be so much cheaper (expand the pricing structures, old vs new... and of course, divide the old by 12 as it's annual).

Pricing changed when Google Drive came out. 1TB/mo used to be ~$21/mo. Now it's ~$50/mo. I grabbed 200GB prior to the jump; glad I'm able to stick to paying the legacy price as long as I don't change my account...

When Amazon or Google starts to offer encryption, then this will be interesting. Today they have the crypto key and can see all you files. They also technically own you files. Let me store a private PGP key on Google/Amazon servers so that they can't index my files!

People seems to forget that Googles business is your personal information. For them, you are the commodity. They index everything and stores it forever.

According to Swedish law (where I live), Google have to disclosure what information they store about me. Google refuses. The trial will start soon. Me Vs Google. The big question: what are they hiding? Why don't they disclosure the information?

I don't understand how media don't report anything about this. Google seems to be able to do anything. Using their streetview cars to sniff data, and refuse to delete to stolen data. Every time you open Google maps, you location is stored (the reason why Apple dumped Google maps. Apple don't make its money from data mining.

When Amazon or Google starts to offer encryption, then this will be interesting. Today they have the crypto key and can see all you files. They also technically own you files. Let me store a private PGP key on Google/Amazon servers so that they can't index my files!

It's hard to imagine how these cloud storage providers could provide encrypted storage which would fully satisfy the paranoid.

When Amazon or Google starts to offer encryption, then this will be interesting. Today they have the crypto key and can see all you files. They also technically own you files. Let me store a private PGP key on Google/Amazon servers so that they can't index my files!

t's hard to imagine how these cloud storage providers could provide encrypted storage which would fully satisfy the paranoid.

When Amazon or Google starts to offer encryption, then this will be interesting. Today they have the crypto key and can see all you files. They also technically own you files. Let me store a private PGP key on Google/Amazon servers so that they can't index my files!

People seems to forget that Googles business is your personal information. For them, you are the commodity. They index everything and stores it forever.

According to Swedish law (where I live), Google have to disclosure what information they store about me. Google refuses. The trial will start soon. Me Vs Google. The big question: what are they hiding? Why don't they disclosure the information?

I don't understand how media don't report anything about this. Google seems to be able to do anything. Using their streetview cars to sniff data, and refuse to delete to stolen data. Every time you open Google maps, you location is stored (the reason why Apple dumped Google maps. Apple don't make its money from data mining.

Let me pay for Google programs with privacy!

Apple make its money by price-gouging, Google makes theirs by analytics.

I understand the article is about the price drop and all, but for a true comparison of the two company's data storage policies, you should add Amazon Glacier to the chart. It kind of blows away the Google long term storage pricing at .01 per GB. That being said, it only makes sense to use the long term storage from the company that you use for the rest of your cloud services.

Doesn't all this have to do with the price of hard drives finally coming down and not so much economies of scale? Economies of scale are vital but I think that concept applies directly to the number of users which AWS already has enough to make it a fairly efficient operation already.

I think that is definitely part of it, but I think a bigger part is competition. This is a fantastic example of what happens when companies compete for business. They innovate, they reduce costs, they lower prices.

A little OT, but it would be nice if we could get some of this in the telecommunications/broadband sector. Imagine the price wars that would ensue if every municipality owned the fiber networks, dropped dumb pipes to everyone's house, then charged Verizon and Comcast a small fee to use the infrastructure. Prices would plummet, and speeds would skyrocket.

Doesn't all this have to do with the price of hard drives finally coming down and not so much economies of scale? Economies of scale are vital but I think that concept applies directly to the number of users which AWS already has enough to make it a fairly efficient operation already.

Perhaps, but could it also have to do with greater efficiencies overall, both on hardware and software ends? Especially with the expansion of all sorts of "cloud" services, more economy of scale should be achieved.

I wonder if we are experiencing something similar to what happened in the .com boom with fiber deployment. Then, companies were scrambling to expand their network ASAP (including transoceanic lines), with the hope of cashing in on the predicted exponential growth in bandwidth usage. At the same time, though, compression and distribution technologies were making much better use the existing infrastructure. End result-oversupply, then crash...

When Amazon or Google starts to offer encryption, then this will be interesting. Today they have the crypto key and can see all you files. They also technically own you files. Let me store a private PGP key on Google/Amazon servers so that they can't index my files!

If users are concerned about this and technically savvy, I wonder if the dedicated Web hosting with a top-tier provider may be the better option. Even if the pricing is a bit higher, the tradeoff would be greater control and data security. Sure, it requires more initiative, but may be worth it.

Life will be interesting when these services are offering storage at a yearly rate rougly equal to what you would pay for the physical storage space. With the failure rates at this point it would be worth it for someone like me to stop maintaining my own server and just pay the monthly fee.

I've spent a long time on google drive, $2.50/month for 25GB, just recently bought a Kindle Fire HD and moved to Amazon Cloud services. 20GB for $10/year, cheaper and well integrated into my new tablet. I'm quite happy with it. I still keep my free 5GB Google Drive for my work docs and whatnot, Kindle has Office Pro that integrates with gdrive and works great.

A little off topic here,but Amazon needs to waive the yearly fee of $25/yr that they charge on their music service, cause they only give u 250 songs to upload before they charge you the fee. If Google can waive it then why can't Amazon do the same? You should get unlimited uploads once you get a Prime subscription would help get more customers on their side, but then again, not Bezos either...